Tag Archives: health improvement

In recent times, walking has been enlisted as one of the key weapons in the war on inactivity. Planners and policymakers have taken note of evidence highlighting the benefits of walking for health and wellbeing. Meanwhile, local and national governments have taken up the challenge of embedding walking into policy, strategy and guidance. There are now national walking strategies for England, Wales and Scotland, and from Belfast to Bristol local councils have published their own plans to get more people walking.

Travel trends and their costs

During the twentieth century, there was a shift from work involving physical labour to jobs of a more sedentary nature. In addition, the growth of suburbs and rising car ownership has contributed to a decline in people travelling on foot. At the same time, the attractions of television and home computers mean fewer people are spending their leisure time playing sports or taking part in outdoor activities.

“Sedentary lifestyles increase all causes of mortality, double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and anxiety.”

Worldwide, around two million deaths a year are attributed to physical inactivity.

In the UK, physical activity contributes to one in six deaths, and costs £7.4 billion a year to business and wider society. It is the fourth largest cause of disease and disability in the UK.

In Scotland, inactivity contributes to over 2,500 deaths each year, costing the NHS £94.1m annually.

The benefits of walking

Efforts encouraging people to become more active have had mixed results, and there is now a recognition that turning the tide of physical activity may take decades to achieve. But there’s also a growing understanding that physical activity that can be built in to everyday life can be as effective as supervised exercise programmes. And, as we reported last week, the health benefits of walking can be demonstrated in unexpected ways, such as the emergence of the Pokémon Go game as an incentive to exercise.

A recent report from the Arup design and engineering firm highlights that walking is good for cities as well as for people. It details more than 50 ways in which the world can benefit from walkable cities, including:

Social benefits – health and wellbeing, safety, placemaking, social cohesion and equality.

Another key theme of the Arup report was the importance of planning for pedestrians:

“If we want cities to be more walkable, the way we design cities has to change. Walkable places are more compact, dense with mixed uses. Streets have to be well connected with more shade from sun and rain, green spaces, trees and public spaces. And, we must pay more attention to the quality of public spaces, not just providing quantity of walkable space.” Joanna Rowelle, Director at Arup

The report lists 40 actions that city leaders can consider to inform walking policy, strategy and design. Among the ideas:

Temporarily removing cars from a city can transform roads into public spaces, raise awareness around car dependency, reduce air pollution, and reveal the potential opportunities created by having more – and safer – spaces for people.

Financial incentives and disincentives, including subsidies and taxes like congestion charges, can be used to encourage behaviour change.

Use of shared spaces to create a pedestrian-oriented environment where people are aware of fellow road users.

Unused infrastructure – such as New York City’s High Line – offers major opportunities for facilitating safe and attractive pedestrian routes and activity spaces.

Urban regeneration creates the opportunity to redevelop small pieces of land into pocket parks or public spaces with a green character.

Rivers and waterways can be transformed from barriers into walking and cycling routes by creating green and accommodating waterfronts.

Best foot forward?

Many of the suggestions in the Arup report are not hard to implement, and needn’t be costly. But even when schemes have been enacted, they may face opposition.

Each weekend, for the past seven years, a busy thoroughfare in Bucharest has been cleared to create Via Sport – a safe space for leisure and sport. This summer, the city’s new mayor claimed Via Sport has been causing traffic problems. The scheme has now been closed for the foreseeable future.

Old instincts die hard. Those rethinking patterns and processes of urban design to stimulate walking (and cycling) will face a few bumps in the road. But the potential rewards will be great. As David Sim of Gehl Architects observes:

“The key strategy is about getting people to actually spend time out on the street. They become a part of the space, familiar with their neighbours, and are in tune with city life.”

Due to the number of headlines, stories and anecdotes it’s generated, you would be forgiven for thinking that Pokémon Go had been around for months. In fact, the app only officially launched in the UK on the 14th of July, following its initial rollout a week before in the US, Australia and New Zealand. In amongst reports of players straying onto private property, construction sites and train tracks, as well as criminals and police forces using the game’s lure function to their advantage, have been suggestions that the app has real potential to improve the health and fitness of its players.

Transformed from its 90s incarnation of a trading cards game into a GPS powered app, Pokémon Go nevertheless retains its main aim: gotta catch ‘em all. Pokémon appear to players – trainers as they are known in the game – as they move around their area. Crucially, some Pokémon are only available in certain areas (or continents!), meaning that trainers will not be able to achieve the game’s objective unless they move around further than their immediate location.

Gotta catch the…health benefits?

This is where the potential health benefits lie. The first player to catch them all (or all of those available in his country, at least), Roberto Vazquez told journalists that his quest had led to him walking 165 miles (12-25 per day), losing 25lbs in the process. Plastic surgeons Clinic Compare have even managed to calculate how many Pokémon the average person would have to catch in order to lose weight, by comparing the number of calories burned per hour with the average amount of time it takes players to catch a single Pokémon. For example, according to their estimates, it would take 16.27 days for a 165lb female playing the game for 43 minutes each day to lose 1lb, while jogging at a speed of five miles per hour.

It has also been suggested that the app has the potential to help children meet their recommended physical activity levels, without even realising it. With evidence indicating that children are only almost half as likely to want to play outdoors than their parents did at their age, choosing to stay indoors and watch TV or play video games instead, it could be argued that Pokémon Go presents the perfect opportunity to combine indoor and outdoor play.

What does the evidence say?

It’s important to acknowledge that these examples are either anecdotal or based on averages not actually generated by the app itself. While it’s still too early to collect reliable statistics on the game’s potential health impact, qualified medical professionals have stated their belief that it may be a force for good. In an editorial for the BMJ, Glasgow-based GP Margaret McCartney notes the potential for Pokémon Go and similar apps to “make the streets an active, reclaimed playground”, which she describes as a “tantalising side effect” of an app that is not specifically marketed as having the potential to positively impact on players’ health and wellbeing.

Pokémon Go is not the first entertainment-based game to have caught the eye of professionals and policymakers due to its potential for promoting physical activity. Evaluations of Nintendo Wii Fit, for example, have suggested that regular use has the potential to have a positive impact on different groups of people, including those with MS. Regular use is obviously essential in order to generate reliable evidence of whether or not Pokémon Go can have any genuine impact on health and wellbeing. Although cynics may argue that the app is just another fad that will soon die down, the data suggests it’s here to stay for at least the foreseeable future, with 6.1 million trainers in Britain alone, 87% of which were still playing a week after downloading.

“The environment in which we live, work and spend leisure time – both the physical nature of places and the social environment of communities – has an enormous impact on our health and wellbeing. Health problems such as obesity, chronic heart disease, stress and mental health issues are intricately linked to the environments in which people live and work”. (RTPI, 2014)

Earlier this month the RTPI published Promoting healthy cities: Why planning is critical to a healthy urban future, the third in a series of Planning Horizons papers launched to mark the RTPI’s centenary. The report looks at how planning can help to create healthy cities – one of its main arguments being that health and wellbeing need to be at the core of city design and development.

With a growing number of people living in urban areas, and health problems such obesity and diabetes on the rise, planning for healthy cities is vital. And interest in the links between planning and urban health is nothing new.